The best they could get from a squalid tragedy

The jury at the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by police marksmen at Stockwell tube station three years ago, in the mistaken belief that he was a suicide bomber, have returned an Open verdict on his death.




Whatever gloss the police might try to put on this, it is a devastating indictment of their behaviour, particularly after the tragic incident, where officers have clearly lied in their teeth to protect themselves. The coroner ruled out a verdict of Unlawful Killing as an option, otherwise I reckon the jury may well have returned such a verdict. There was certainly no grounds for the outcome desired by the police, that of Lawful Killing, not only because they got the wrong man but because the procedures were flawed and several officers covered up the truth.

The result is the best the De Menezes family could have got, though the family must feel anger as well as grief that some police officers are getting off the hook. The De Menezes family lawyer suggested that perjury charges could be brought against officers who claimed to have shouted a warning which none of the tube train passengers heard, but that option has been ruled out of order.

What is SO distressing about the case is not the tragic death itself - though of course to the family of the dead man it is everything. It was understandable in those anxiety fraught hours and days after the July 7th bombings that police officers would take extreme measures to stop a repeat and that there was the possibility of a mistake being made.

What has angered me throughout is that the police seem to have been unable to put their hands up and say 'we made an honest mistake which has cost a man his life and we are more sorry than you can imagine'

Instead a smoke screen was thrown up, a tissue of lies about De Menezes vaulting the barrier to escape the law, suggestions that he was an illegal immigrant (as if that made killing him justified in any case) We now know too that the firearms police believed they were operating under Kratos, a strategy the British special firearms unit adopted, secretly, from training they absorbed at the hands of the Israeli security forces. Basically this says, if you are virtually certain you have the right man, don't shout a warning because they will blow the device. Instead open fire to the head and kill them. (The bullets they use, incidentally, are fragment on impact bullets which virtually destroy the victim's brain and do not go through the body, thus are safer in a crowded place).

Now I can understand why they believed this to be such a situation, (wrongly directed though it was and I am yet to fathom how the operational control seems to have skated out from under this mess...except of course for the ritual 'falling on his sword' of Sir Iain Blair. The officers who were directly responsible are still in post) What I cannot understand is why, once the error was realised, the police had to concoct all sorts of stories about shouting warnings and De Menezes reaching for something suddenly. All of this, as testified by eye-witnesses, is rubbish.

We seem to have a situation where specially trained police units are told to operate in a way which is outside the code of practice laid down for armed confrontation. However they are not to ever ADMIT that such a covert policy is in existence and to go through the theatre of claiming that they had taken such and such an action in accordance with the rule-book.



One of the two men shown above, C2, who shot De Menezes broke down in the witness box and said it was a burden he would have to carry for the rest of his life. And I believe him. But he HAS his life and that of his family. The De Menezes family have lost an innocent son to a horrible operational mistake.

I don't suggest for a minute that the police officers are any happier than anyone else that an innocent man died. I believe that they set out to do their duty in protecting the public from bombers..and that is a brave and honourable thing to do. What is neither brave nor honourable, is, once a mistake has been realised, to do everything possible to obstruct the course of justice by claiming all sorts of actions on their part which didn't happen...and all sorts of actions by the dead man -also which didn't happen - which impugn him and his family.

When are the police going to realise that the public would have far more respect for them if they told the straight, honest truth that they tried to do the right thing and failed. We are all human, we can all understand that. What the public cannot stomach, from our guardians of law and order, is a tissue of lies every time a serious mistake is made, designed to cover arses. That HAS to stop.